So, most people actually phrase this question in its slightly less existential forms: “what do you plan to do once you get your PhD?” “are you going to teach, or…?,” and last but not least daunting, “what will you do with yourself if you quit?” The title question stands because this is the way it runs through my head most days.
Let’s start with what a PhD is not good for, included but not limited to: your self-esteem, your free time, your hobbies, your relationships with everyone you know*, your love for learning, your stamina, your attention span, and, for many, some chunk of your soul. If you don’t pay proper homage to the gods of tuition, it can be not great for your credit score. If your university doesn’t award you a decent stipend, it’s not very good for your budget and therefore your diet, living conditions, and/or time management if you need to take on another job. If your university is not affiliated with a major medical school and/or insurance company, then a PhD is pretty bad for your healthcare access and medical debt, too.
I’ve had personal experience with every one of these losses in the last four years, but they are also well-documented in various studies that I read about when I started to have thoughts of quitting. The first statistic I found made me realize I wasn’t alone in such thoughts: 50% of PhD students quit their program before graduating. After a few pieces from Inside Higher Ed, The Chronicle, and Nature convinced me that I had made an objectively bad decision in coming here, I turned to more qualitative voices like personal blogs and LEGO Grad Student. Their experiences matched mine, put a face and a form to the realities of being “twice as likely to have mental health problems.”
Sitting in the cafeteria of the Senate Hart building, on the corners of First Street NW and Capitol Street NW in Washington, D.C., my friend asked our professor, “But what if you can’t handle the mental and emotional burden of being an anthropologist?” (My para-phrasing, but we talked about what she meant extensively afterward.) “Do some people just not make it?” Our professor, my advisor, shrugged a little and nodded. “Yeah. Sometimes, for whatever reason, lots of people decide not to see it through.” (Also paraphrasing. Considering that this was during an Ethnography Field School, I probably should have taken better notes….) After class we sat on the Capitol lawn and tussled over that idea for a long time—were some people disqualified from becoming anthropologists? What stopped them from accessing those tools? What did they do instead? Where are their voices now? Could this happen—or was it happening already—to us?
Collectively, we felt a chip on our shoulder. The very experiences that brought us to anthropology and shaped our insider/outsider subjectivities were the ones that retraumatized us now, in our power-laden relationships and resource-starved efforts. Amongst ourselves we shared stories of abusive childhoods and emotional poltergeists, specters that remained and rose angry heads in direct response to the articles we read, the discussions we had, the knowledge we absorbed or rejected a million times over in the course of an average day. We were encouraged to question our positionality with respect to themes of violence, and we found the clues in our own bodies—what is it that makes this process ripe for depression, anxiety, and autoimmune disorders rather than the transformative possibilities of creation?
An answer, because we need one—the pros of going through this sort of academic hazing range from petty privileges to personal breakthroughs. William Burroughs and The Tunnel, I didn’t understand it when I first read it but the pervading metaphor haunts me now while I do my own research. I feel so hyperfocused on the miniscule details of the documents, artifacts, and testimonies before me that I barely have mindspace for the other facets of my life: my love, my friendships, my family obligations, my hobbies. But on the other side of collecting these scraps of knowledge is weaving something more complex, a tapestry of questions and answers worth considering.
In her autobiography, Zora describes her doctoral program in Anthropology at Columbia with equal parts affection and ambivalence. She refers to the American father of anthropology Franz Boas as “Papa Franz,” which scandalizes the department secretary but I love. Yet she is not awarded her degree for her efforts because of her immersion in her own work, which famously begins, “I was glad when someone told me, go and collect Negro folklore.” Similarly, I was glad when my advisor asked me, why don’t you study the contaminated base in your backyard? I get to make it about my own life, insider knowledge that gives me an advantage yet an outsider methodology and perspective that will influence my findings. The ultimate anthropological balance, in accordance with my prior experience in auto-ethnographic, historical, and epidemiological research in my own home county. But I always worry, will I be too close, and contaminate my own site? Should I follow a thread of ideas from place to place like Zora did? In this way, without becoming Dr. Zora Neale Hurston, she developed social connections and personal missions that guided her next endeavors and success at organizing cultural connections through music. She was clearly shaped and even launched by the work she did towards a PhD she was not given—my worst nightmare, and she barely bats the proverbial eyelash, goes on to do much more important and far-reaching work.
My personal approach to medical anthropology centers heavily around the concept of habitus, more simply defined as something like disposition, where who we are derives from what we do, where we came from, and what we are moving toward. The everyday actions we take form the mentalities that shape the decisions we will make tomorrow, and were set into motion by the decisions we made yesterday and the day before. Working towards a PhD may problematize both your over-arching goals and visions and your more quotidian petty struggles, reshaping your lifestyle into an unhealthy mess.
On the other hand, finding the mythical way forward through this clusterf*ck of mental health booby traps can lead a person to the activist-acamedic’s nirvana, praxis. This is a good old-fashioned Marxian term referring to the alignment between what you labor toward and what you believe in, contrary to the perversions of capitalist accumulation.
*Your cohort-mates will become your new bffs as you spend all your time together studying, commiserating, and coping.
skeptiki 